Tiger Lily - May Dawson Page 0,4

The door slamming shut seemed to echo through the apartment.

“Did she know you and I were together?” I demanded. He was the target of my fury, but I didn’t know if I felt sorry for her, or if I hoped she forgot her shirt under our bed and had to parade half-naked all the way home. “Have you been doing this for a long time?”

“It’s not her fault,” he said defensively, and I thought he was going to take the blame. Then he added, “It’s yours.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s yours,” he repeated, beginning to get louder. He jumped out of bed and stood on the other side, wearing nothing but the boxers and t-shirt he must have yanked on in a hurry before I came in. “You never want to have sex with me anymore. You wear leggings everyday—leggings aren’t sexy. You sing Disney songs all the time. Do you know how annoying that is?”

I felt a rumble in my chest. Nope. Not now.

His voice kept rising. “You’re not a Disney princess, Lily! You’re just an ordinary boring girl, nothing special, and I—“

I growled, a sound deep in my chest that I couldn’t help. I covered my mouth with my hand, horrified.

He stared at me for a second, frowning, then must decide it was his imagination, because he went on. Oh no. Please shut up. Please, please, please.

“I deserve better, frankly,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you, but it’s time for me to move on.”

“Pack your stuff and get out.” My voice came out deeper than usual, a bit of a growl, and I coughed.

“I’m not leaving,” he said, too distracted by his own newly manufactured self-righteousness to realize there’s something wrong with me. “You can leave. I paid for half the deposit, and I don’t want to—”

“You need to go.” My voice came out in a half roar.

He stared at me. “What’s wrong with you?”

His voice was full of contempt.

I pressed my hand to the top of my head, trying to hide the cat ears that I can feel suddenly push up my springy orange curls. Then my hand—paw—suddenly felt heavy.

I couldn’t stop it anymore.

As I tigered out, he started screaming. But the volume of his voice was lost to the rush of blood through my ears as I dropped to all fours. I tried to fight it, knowing I shouldn’t shift in front of Brad, but my brain couldn’t control my broken heart anymore.

It was a relief to let go of this damned human-skin.

3

When I called my grandfather from the wreckage of my apartment—it doesn’t matter that I found the coolest lamp at the Crate and Barrel outlet, my inner cat apparently deeply resents table lamps—he listened to my whole sob story, before he admitted he had his own.

He’d fallen off a ladder and broken his arm

So I headed home to Silver Springs.

Still, a strange sense of calm came over me as I drove toward Silver Springs, and once I entered the city limits—and the wards that protect Silver Springs’ magic from being seen by humans—my stress seemed to drop away entirely. I drove the cute, quaint streets before I turned toward home, checking out the new stores and restaurants, some of them owned by my childhood friends. Then I drove past the park and the orphanage to my childhood home and parked in front of the house.

As I got out of the car, I contemplated the white house from a distance. Was it just my imagination, or did it lean a bit more to the left than it used to? That was fine for the tower of Pisa, not so much for the house that’s been in my family for generations.

“Hey Grandpa!” I called as I came into the house. Part of me wouldn’t believe that he broke his arm until I saw a cast. My grandfather was tricky and competitive and sweetly obsessed with me.

Right now, part of me wanted to come home. But even at twenty-four, something about my granddad’s insistence made me feel a teenage resistance.

Maybe we were both stubborn as cats, as my mother used to claim, despite my grandfather being human.

The house carried a familiar scent of old wood and a faint campfire smokiness due to my grandfather’s love for his woodstove, and I stopped to inhale deeply. It smelled like home.

My grandfather shuffled into the entryway, and my heart ached at the sight. He looked older every time I saw him. But he still wore one of his signature jaunty bowties,